1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to load balancing in data communication systems, including in connection with visual voicemail systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Visual voicemail enables information about audible voicemails to be seen visually, such as header information and voice-to-text translations of the voicemails.
To facilitate this functionality, a system of visual voicemail servers may receive requests for visual voicemail services, such as requests to save, deposit, or delete voicemails and/or for information about voicemails. In turn, this system of visual voicemail servers may issue corresponding requests to a set of voicemail servers that are managing the relevant voicemails, receive responses to these requests, aggregate the responses, and provide the aggregated information back to the sources of the original requests.
To manage a large volume of traffic, requests from the system of visual voicemail servers to voicemail servers at a particular location may be managed by a proxy server. The proxy server may allocate one or more of these requests to a particular voicemail server at the particular location as part of a load balancing process.
The use of such proxy servers to perform load balancing, however, can be costly. They can also limit the control that the system of visual voicemail servers may exercise over the voicemail servers, the ability of the system of visual voicemail servers to become aware of problems with the voicemail servers, and/or the ability of the system of visual voicemail servers to easily expand to accommodate additional voicemail servers.